NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Curoverse has raised $1.5 million in seed money that it will use to develop commercial software products based on Arvados, an open-source computational storage platform that was developed to support Harvard's Personal Genome Project.
The funds raised in the round include investments from Hatteras Venture Partners, Point Judith Ventures, Common Angels, MassVentures, and Boston Global Ventures.
Curoverse's first product will be a subscriptions-based platform-as-a-service offering that, for a yet-to-be disclosed fee, will provide Arvados' computational management and data storage capabilities as well as software installation, integration, maintenance, and support. The company will also offer a free version of Arvados that will have the same features as the commercial product but will exclude the added support.
This announcement marks the start of a six-month private beta to test the Arvados PaaS product before it launches officially next summer. Curoverse plans to release other products based on the platform but is not disclosing details about what those products will be at this time.
Arvados was originally developed in George Church's lab at Harvard Medical School by a team of scientists and software engineers led by Alexander Wait Zaranek, PGP's informatics director and Curoverse's scientific director. The platform includes a content addressable distributed storage system and a computational management system.
It is intended to provide "a complete stack of commercially-supported, community-driven, open-source technologies that apply elastic computing and big-data strategies to the unique requirements of genomic research and precision medicine," Adam Berrey, Curoverse's CEO, said in a statement.
Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, added that “the Arvados software and the data collected through [the PGP] can be a foundation for the development and delivery of precision medicine in cancer, neo-natal care, inherited diseases, pharmacogenomics, and a variety of other applications.”
Curoverse, previously named Clinical Futures, was legally incorporated in 2010.